


as her city burns

by dellaluce



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-09-10
Updated: 2010-09-10
Packaged: 2017-10-11 15:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/114025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaluce/pseuds/dellaluce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>how to play a game like war. [AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	as her city burns

When Jade's grandfather comes home from a trip, he always brings her something. It helps when she's lonely, knowing that he's thinking of her when he's gone, thinking of what she might like to add to her collections.

He brings her anything he thinks she might like, and she loves it all. Elegant lacquered folding fans from China, delicate butterflies of Austrian crystal, bracelets of turquoise and roped silver from Egypt; or sometimes just stuffed animals, or Russian china dolls, or funny little gadgets from Japan. A mobile of dangling Mayan jade leaves, golden sun pendants, quetzal feathers. Colorful Hopi kachinas. Hand-painted picture books from France. And on and on and on, the next and the next, something new, something pretty that she can keep in her room and admire.

And sometimes she breaks her pretty things. She cried, at first--but her grandfather can't stand to see her cry, so he gets a new one for her, a better one, something so different and wonderful that she doesn't even miss what she broke in the first place. Eventually, it stops mattering so much, and that's when her workbench disappears underneath parts and pieces; she pries open music boxes just to find out where the music is made, and turns her beautiful copper clockwork bird into a mess of metal and gear and springs. It's neat, she thinks, digging in and seeing how things work, and she doesn't even have to put them back together if she doesn't want. It's neat, she thinks, how she can just get a new one.

It's neat, and it gets a little boring, too. Once she knows how everything she owns works, she wants to start a new collection. She wants something else. Something different.

"I want a game," Jade says to her grandfather, tugging at his sleeve. She is small, a little sickly, a little delicate like her china dolls; she thinks that's why he's afraid of saying no to her, because he thinks he might break her when he doesn't know where all her edges are.

"I'm lonely," she adds.

"Alright, love." He pulls off his glasses, squints, smiles, and lifts her into his lap. "What do you want in your game?"

She tells him.

\---

The last four gifts her grandfather gives her are precious.

1.) **Her game. **Jade asked for a game to play with, and she got the most breathtaking chess set anyone could ever hope to have. Her golden city defies explanation, except that it makes her eyes hurt from the glimmer when the light catches it the wrong way, and it's full of living chess pieces, shiny white and friendly. They like to smile at her, and she likes to smile at them; she talks and laughs and plays with other living, breathing, thinking (_maybe? she doesn't know_) things for the first time in her life. Eventually, she wants to dig in and see how they work. She takes to it gleefully, and it's so easy because they do whatever she wants them to do, and she loves them for it. They stop smiling at her after that, but it's okay, she thinks. They're always making new ones.

2.) **Her lunchtop**. More importantly, the friends that come with it. They're the first contact she's ever had with other humans; all the books she read and all the stories her grandfather told didn't prepare her. They're new and interesting and so, _so _different, John with his good-natured curiosity and Rose with her elegant poise and Dave with his feigned indifference. She puts her focus into learning all about them, and she doesn't feel so lonely when her grandfather leaves anymore.

3.) **A piece of advice**. He tells her that one day, she'll go off and join the world. "Brimming with a mess of people," he tells her, smiling, "all full of life and love and laughter. It'll be yours, if you want it." He tells her about Paris and Rome and Madrid and Moscow, about traditions and customs and language, about all the people he's met and all the things he's done. He wants that for her, too, for her to get lost in the streets of Dresden, to share food with strangers in Marrakesh, to learn Spanish and use all the wrong verb tenses in Barcelona. "Don't be afraid," he tells her. "It's yours, if you want it. No one can keep you from what you want." She believes him, and she loves him, and she trusts him, so she takes it to heart.

4.) **The Art of War**. He doesn't give the book to her in any real sense. When he dies, Jade spends her days crying in his study and picking through his belongings as though each one is a different piece of him--like someone just took him apart to see how he worked and hasn't put him back together yet. She finds the dog-eared copy in the bottom drawer of his desk, well-worn and well-loved; and if he loved it so much, she thinks, then maybe she could love it too. She reads it and learns it and memorizes it as though her grandfather had actually written it.

It brings with it a kind of focus, a kind of clarity and direction that she didn't have before. She isn't the only one who likes to know how things work, the only one who likes to take them apart. Her grandfather liked taking apart machines and animals and businesses; Sun Tzu liked taking apart people and armies and war-princes. Jade likes taking apart everything.

When the time comes for her game to start in earnest, she's nervous and anxious and excited, but beneath that, there's a steadiness and purpose. She feels ready. It's time to put what she's learned to the test.

Her grandfather told her to set her sights on the world, and she will, but she won't be joining it and its mess of people. They'll be joining her.

**I.**

If soldiers are punished before they have grown attached to you, they will not prove submissive; and, unless submissive, they will be practically useless.

\---

A war needs armies and a game needs players, so the obvious place for her to start is with her friends. She's got a neat, shiny chessboard that she's been familiarizing herself with for years now, and there are rules to be followed and roles to be assigned. She's got it all figured out, because she knows her friends and she knows how they move: John, her Rook, a credit to her late-game and a force second only to the Queen; Rose, her Bishop, strength in range and oblique assaults; Dave, her Knight, her early game rank-breaker, dominating close-quarters on a crowded board. The potential is there, but she needs them to be...

More. She needs them to be perfect. She needs them to go where she tells them to go, do what she tells them to do, and think the way she needs them to think. She's going to have to break them in, with an unfortunate, and maybe even unfair emphasis on "break," but it has to happen or they'll ruin everything. Sometimes a bone has to be re-fractured to set it right; she has to take apart a machine before she can put it back together better than it was before.

And if they come out stronger on the other side, that's what matters, isn't it?

\---

She loves John. He's simple. Not stupid, but uncomplicated; she can reach out and touch all the gears that make him tick, he keeps them so close to the surface. And even in his tangle of teenaged growing pains, everything works with an easy, black and white flow of cause and effect: his father is great, therefore he must become great; the result doesn't mirror the intent, therefore he must have done it wrong; he can't do what the situation demands, therefore he is useless; there is Bad in him sometimes, therefore he can't be Good.

There's something charming in his self-deprecation, so silly and innocent that it would hurt if she could be hurt like that. But she can't, so she doesn't feel even the tiniest twinge of guilt when she grabs onto his fraying edges and pulls, _hard_.

It's nothing personal. She just knows how to take an opportunity when it presents itself.

She finds that she can condense her strategy into six words, and that's how she knows it's flawless: _You'll get it right someday, John_! She may as well deliver a dissertation on all his shortcomings, because that's what it becomes in his head. It isn't exactly right, therefore it is exactly wrong. He did not perfectly succeed, therefore he has perfectly failed.

She starts out slow. She saves it for small moments where it's a shot of optimism and encouragement, even if it's never exactly what he needs. "You'll get it right someday, John!" When he's still awful at swinging that hammer, getting outclassed by high-level enemies, scrambling to figure out what's going on, it makes him feel a little better. He's figuring out the ropes. Everyone cuts the newbie some slack. He'll get it right someday.

But she doesn't stop there. She starts henpecking at perfection so sweetly it's like she doesn't even know she's doing it, and he'd never say anything because--she means well, right? Oh, how she loves that about John. Everyone is sincere until they tell him directly, _sincerely_, that they aren't.

After awhile, he flinches every time she says it, puts on a forced grin and laughs through a clenched jaw.

_I'm not good enough now, therefore I will never be._

John makes the perfect music box, the same melody over and over again, and when he starts to wind down, she can twist him back up to the beginning. Repetition is lovely, she thinks.

\---

Rose is a Seer for all the right reasons: logical, rational, intelligent, organized, and brutally perceptive. If anyone could end the game before it begins, it would be her, so Jade treads lightly at first, figuring out all the edges. Rose is a fortress without an army, guarded only by her sharp angles and towering walls, and she might even be a little intimidating if Jade's intention was to storm right in.

She's not that stupid. She goes in through the front gate.

Rose's strength is her sight and there's no use running from it; she was born with a mind for tactics, clever and quick, knows misdirection and gambits when she sees them. So Jade does the only thing she can: she lets herself be seen. She lets Rose dissect her, read between her lines, compile and organize and process all the information she possibly can before she comes to a final decision. Extrapolation is Rose's forte, after all, and she runs with it so well.

_Raised in isolation. Sole caregiver frequently absent. Limited exposure to media; exposure to society at large minimal. No such models make her unlikely to engage in destructive behavior_.

It's a long process, turning a strength into a weakness, but Jade is nothing if not patient.

For all Rose's logic and intelligence and perception, there's an arrogance and an inflexibility that runs in her: once she thinks she's come to the correct answer, she doesn't question it, because mistakes are weakness, and she is not--cannot be--weak. It's beautiful and tragic, Jade thinks, the Seer who blinds herself because she doesn't know how to do anything else. She likes that about her.

Once she's is out of sight, Jade gets to work, and it's easy because Rose is only ever hard on the outside. Her strategy becomes one of serving the opposite of the Seer's needs. When she wants to be taken seriously, Jade pretends to ask her questions, but no, nevermind, she needs an expert on the subject, sorry to bother her. When she wishes she had the love of her mother, Jade talks about her grandfather, all the amazing ways he showed his love, the stories and the gifts and the holidays together. And when she needs someone to gouge themselves on her thorns just to prove she's worth the effort, Jade does nothing--because she has no thorns and she's effortless to love. By the time Rose realizes that Jade is everything she isn't, she's already twisting herself up into elegant knots.

She practically does most of the work all on her own, and in a way, it reminds Jade of her pretty little Mayan mobile: soft feathers, hard stone and metal, glimmering and shining and beautiful the way it dangles uselessly.

\---

There are enough things she likes about Dave that she'd have trouble picking the one she likes the most, if she had to.

1.) She'd never be able to take him in a head-on fight. He's built himself up for offense--sometimes in ways that seem a little too practiced to be natural, but the casual cruelty in how he wages war in his own defense is just exquisite. He has a nose for blood and wastes no time going for the throat, effortless and efficient, as calculated as it is impassioned. He's a bit of a guard dog in that way, and Jade likes that. It just means he'll fight that hard for her once she's got a collar on him.

2.) He'll keep his hand in the fire as long as he thinks he's the one putting it there. She thinks it's sort of funny, and a little bit sad, too. He'd never let anyone else do to him what he does to himself, but as long as he has that illusion of control, he's satisfied, even if it burns. It's dedication on his best days, masochism on his worst, and any number of things on the inbetweens; for her purposes, it's suggestibility, and she likes that. When he talks to her, shares his music, his art, his photography, it's because he thinks he wants to. And when he pushes her aside, takes swords and clubs and magic, bleeds for his trouble, it's because he thinks he wants to, too. After awhile, it starts being the truth.

3.) Where he's strong, he's very strong, but where he's weak, he's _weak_, and she likes that. She finds it so easy to tear through his personae like wax paper, peel back that manufactured confidence, dig right into him, and he doesn't even put up a fight. No guessing games here; beneath it all, there's just a desperation and need that leaves her breathless. _See me, notice me, love me_. She's got his heart in her hands, and she thinks she's going to have to be gentle with this one. He's no clockwork bird and she can't spray his gears all over her workbench just for the fun of it.

Dave is straightforward, and so is Jade's strategy for handling him: Give him what he wants, until what he wants is her, fiercely. No one pets his ego quite like she does, and she thinks it's cute the way he starts following her around like a puppy for it. He comes to her for help, for reassurance, for praise and acceptance and adoration, because she never makes him feel weaker for it. In return, he wears her colors and fights under her standard like any proper Knight should.

It's not so terrible, she thinks. Dave's always wanted a reason an a purpose, and now he has it. And isn't it just a little perfect? Just a little storybook romantic? A Knight and his Lady, Time and Space, linked inextricably. He'd follow her into hell and all she'd have to do is ask. She can't buy that kind of loyalty.

\---

When she was smaller--weaker, sicker--her grandfather came home from Africa one day with a beautiful cage in his arms, sturdy brass with delicate scrolling, filled with a riot of lovebirds. He said they were for her, but she suspected that they were really for him; he kept them in the sunny upper atrium, where he would take his tea, let them out, and watch them flutter for the afternoon. Jade thought they were pretty, and liked them well enough until one bit her and drew blood. After that, her grandfather took a hard stance on handling them, but by that point, she didn't want to touch them anyway.

Every six months, she would watch him take them gently in hand, stretch out their wings, and clip their flight feathers. They would shriek and complain and struggle, and it scared her a little in the beginning. "Don't worry, Jade," he'd said that first time. "It doesn't hurt them. They're just afraid."

Snip.

"And it's for their own good, much as they don't know it."

Snip.

"Wouldn't want them flying into a fan, or crashing into a window, would you?"

Snip.

"And least of all, you don't want them flying away. They'd never last in the wild."

Those days, the atrium would be a mess with feathers and squawking, squalling birds. He showed her how to hold them, heads softly between his fingers, how to splay the wings; he showed her where to clip and how and why. Not too low or they'd still be able to fly, not too high or they'd bleed, try to keep them calm and steady so they don't hurt themselves. They didn't understand and they hated it and they fought and thrashed and screeched, but it was fine, her grandfather had said. For their own good.

When he died, Jade was the one left to take care of those pretty little lovebirds, and she just couldn't. They didn't like her much at all, and she could never get close enough to touch them, let alone hold them like her grandpa had. With their next molt, she had no choice but to keep them caged. Anything to keep them safe, she thought, and they were, for awhile, even if they pulled out their own feathers and made awful, angry noises and attacked her hands when she tried to feed them.

She distinctly remembers the day they escaped, watching them fly out the window and off into the distance, feeling so sharply that her grandfather would be so ashamed of he knew. He'd showed her how to do it right and she still managed to do it wrong somehow for all her trying.

But it's been awhile since birds and feathers, and she's determined to do it right this time. Dealing with humans is different from dealing with pawns, and birds, because they think and feel and act and react. It makes it that much more important. She knows, now:

1.) They have to trust her.  
2.) Even then, clip too little and they'll fly away.  
3.) If she can't do it herself, it's better to ask for help than try anyway.  
4.) It must be done.

They're her game pieces, her soldiers, her collection, and they look so pretty in the cage she's built for them, which is why she can't let them go. And she's not going to take any chances, either, not when so much is at stake. This time, when she clips, she's going to clip until she sees blood, and what she hacks off isn't going to grow back.

It'll hurt. They'll be afraid. They'll scream and thrash and cry. But that's fine; only the bird thinks it's cruel.

And if she was different--smaller, weaker, sicker--she might even care.

**Author's Note:**

> while I put this up as unfinished, and it technically is, the chances that I'll come back to this are very, very low, so consider it a one-shot.


End file.
